Merab Mamardashvili: Overcoming apparent life. Merab Mamardashvili: the experience of free thinking Merab Mamardashvili and the vicious circle of Russian history

Merab Mamardashvili. Lectures on ancient philosophy After the destruction of the leisure classes in our country 80 years ago, almost all of us were left with no work, worries and troubles did not count. Our poor idleness has its own activities, most of which are also noble, and to a large extent we philosophize.

Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili(Georgian; September 15, 1930, Gori, Georgian SSR, USSR - November 25, 1990, Moscow) - Soviet philosopher, Doctor of Philosophy (1970), professor at Moscow State University.

Biography

He came out with an extinguished pipe, sat down in a chair in the near corner of the stage, carefully examined those present and began a quiet conversation about eternal metaphysical problems

Born in the city of Gori, Georgian SSR, in the family of a career military man, Konstantin Nikolaevich (d. 1970), his mother, Ksenia Platonovna, came from the old Georgian aristocratic family of Garsevanishvili. Before the start of the Great Patriotic War, he spent his childhood in the Ukrainian city of Vinnitsa, where his father served, where Merab went to first grade; Before that, the family was in Leningrad, where in 1934-1938. The head of the family studied at the Military-Political Academy, and after that - in Kyiv. After the start of the war, the head of the family went to the front, and the family was evacuated to Tbilisi. There M.K. Mamardashvili studied at secondary school No. 14 and graduated in 1949 with a gold medal. He entered the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, from which he graduated in 1954. The beginning of M.K. Mamardashvili’s friendship with Ernst Neizvestny, later a famous sculptor, dates back to the time he entered the university.

In the early 1950s, a number of heated discussions took place in Moscow on topical issues of philosophy related to the death of I.V. Stalin. A number of informal groups appeared at the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University, which played an important role in the development of philosophical thought in the USSR, including the so-called. a group of epistemologists (E.V. Ilyenkov, V.I. Korovikov, etc.) and the Moscow logical (later methodological) circle (A.A. Zinoviev, B.A. Grushin, M.K. Mamardashvili, G.P. Shchedrovitsky and etc.). M. Mamardashvili was one of the founders of the Moscow Logical Circle. In May 1954, a discussion took place on the “Epistemological Theses” of Ilyenkov and Korovikov. The final formation of a circle of “dialectical easel painters” (A. A. Zinoviev, B. A. Grushin, G. P. Shchedrovitsky, M. K. Mamardashvili) is taking place.

In his 4th year, M.K. Mamardashvili fails the exam on the political economy of socialism. In the newspaper “Moscow University” dated January 6, 1953 we read: “The excellent student Mamardashvili could not correctly understand the question of the dual nature of the peasant economy.” Already while studying at the university, he became interested in human consciousness; the nature of thinking is a cross-cutting theme of his philosophy. He defends his thesis “The Problem of the Historical and Logical in Marx’s Capital.”

In 1954-1957 He is a graduate student at Moscow State University, from which he graduated, and in those same years he participated in a logical-methodological seminar under the leadership of A. A. Zinoviev.

After graduating from graduate school (1957), he became a consulting editor in the journal “Problems of Philosophy,” where his first article “Processes of Analysis and Synthesis” (1958) was published. In 1961, in Moscow, M. K. Mamardashvili defended his Ph.D. thesis “On a critique of Hegel’s doctrine of the forms of knowledge.” At the same time he became a member of the CPSU.

In 1961, the International Department of the CPSU Central Committee sent Mamardashvili to Prague to work in the journal “Problems of Peace and Socialism”, where he is the head of the department of criticism and bibliography (1961-1966); The philosopher spoke about this period of his life in one of his many interviews during perestroika). By that time, he had read M. Proust’s novel “In Search of Lost Time,” which played a significant role in his further work. He had business trips to Italy, Germany, East Germany, and Cyprus. This was followed by a refusal to extend the business trip to Paris, Mamardashvili was recalled to Moscow, becoming “restricted from traveling” for several years.

Mamardashvili worked at research institutes in Moscow, including in 1966-1969. Head of the department at the Institute of International Labor Movement of the USSR Academy of Sciences, together with such philosophers as P. P. Gaidenko, Yu. N. Davydov, E. Yu. Solovyov, A. P. Ogurtsov. In 1968-1974. deputy editor-in-chief of the journal “Problems of Philosophy” I. T. Frolova, at the invitation of the latter. At the same time, he lectured at the Faculty of Psychology of Moscow State University (“Problems of the Analysis of Consciousness”). The beginning of his friendship with Yuri Petrovich Senokosov and Alexander Moiseevich Pyatigorsky dates back to that time. M.K. Mamardashvili also gave lectures at the Institute of Cinematography, at the Higher Courses for Scriptwriters and Directors, at the Institute of General and Educational Psychology of the Academy of Pedagogical Sciences of the USSR, in other cities - in Riga, Vilnius, Rostov-on-Don at the invitation or recommendation of friends. These lectures, or conversations as he called them, mostly recorded by him on tape, formed the basis of his creative legacy.

A few randomly selected quotes from lectures and articles by Merab Mamardashvili that will help you understand Russia and some other things

Merab Mamardashvili

1. To want to live is to want to occupy more points in space and time, that is, to replenish or supplement ourselves with what we ourselves do not possess.

2. One of my experiences (because of which, perhaps, I began to engage in philosophy) was... the experience of a completely incomprehensible blindness of people to what exists that leads me to confusion.

3. It is enough to take a closer look at some episodes of Russian history to see that this is a situation where we do not learn from experience. When something happens to us, but we don’t learn from it, and it repeats itself endlessly.<…>We use the word “hell” as an everyday word or a word borrowed from religion, but we forget its original symbolism. Hell is a word that symbolizes something that we know in life and that is the most terrible thing - eternal death. Death that happens all the time. Imagine that we endlessly chew a piece and the chewing does not end. And this is death without end.

4. Some theory is invented, people's lives are rebuilt, and then a gaping concentration camp is discovered there, and the person says: “But I didn’t want that.” Sorry, this doesn't happen. This is not accepted by the heroic consciousness. Even as an apology it is not accepted. The heroic consciousness knows that the devil plays with us when we do not think accurately. Please think precisely. So you just weren't thinking.

5. Many people are ready to suffer forever (as “unfortunate”) in order not to suffer once (as “courageous,” i.e., “decisive”).

6. One of the laws of Russian life is a sigh or an inclination for good, but - tomorrow. And all together, together. Today, what is the point of me being the only one who is kind when everyone around me is evil?

7. What happened in 1921 happened on the level of our souls. Regardless of major disasters This refers to the establishment of the Soviet system in Georgia, accompanied by armed conflicts.. As we grew up, so it happened. Big disasters didn't make us big.

8. It’s not so scary when unanswered thoughts swirl in your head. It's OK. Let them spin. And by the way, this twisting of thoughts is the circle of life.

9. Truth has such a quality or such a law of its appearance that it appears only in the form of lightning (the appearance of truth is as if truth were to shine throughout the whole day, like the sun, this does not happen). So, while it is there, go, it says in the Gospel. I would translate: move, or move while the light flashes.

10. Thought is something into which we must fall again, again and again, “as into heresy,” just as we fall into love.

Ecology of life: He was already striking in appearance. Never directly challenging anything, never breaking any boundaries, he simply - and very naturally - lived as if those boundaries did not exist.

He could still be our contemporary - if during his lifetime he had not felt that he did not belong to any of the times. If I didn’t look at every time and place from the outside, from the point of the absolute. However, such a view would only be useful for our time. Nowadays there seem to be no people with such a view. They weren’t there even then: Mamardashvili was the only one. And in Russia, and in Georgia, and in that very Europe, which he loved very much, from which he learned a lot - and to which he did not go to live and work, although he was invited. When he was fired from the Institute of the History of Natural Science and Technology for “failure to fulfill the plan”, and then deprived of his department at VGIK, he was invited to both Milan and Paris... No, he refused, he went to Georgia. Simply because he was much more needed there. He began his first lecture at the Faculty of Philosophy of Tbilisi University with the words (his listeners of that time still remember them): “I am coming out of my loneliness to your orphanhood and theft.”

It is still unknown, by the way, how it would fit into the context in Europe. He has always had a complex relationship with context, not to mention conventions and authorities.

“Imagine,” recalled Mamardashvili’s friend and publisher of his posthumous books, Yuri Senokosov, “along a rather long corridor<…>a tall, broad-shouldered man in glasses, with a large bald head slightly tilted forward, is moving towards you - not walking, but moving slowly, a tall, broad-shouldered man with glasses, with a large bald head slightly tilted forward, which is why you involuntarily pay attention to this, his whole figure, like that of a gliding speed skater, also seems like would lean forward, although he is clearly in no hurry, and as he passes by, before disappearing onto the landing, you see that he is dressed in a black sweater, he has large features and an attentive gaze.

This unusual human figure, rushing forward under the weight of its head, I remember well, struck me most of all...”

That was the first impression of their long-term friendship, and it essentially did not change.

He was already striking in appearance. Never directly challenging anything, never breaking any boundaries, he simply - and very naturally - lived as if those boundaries did not exist.

“His foreignness was striking,” says his former VGIK student, “both in Moscow and in Tbilisi.”

And this despite the fact that he easily knew how to become his own everywhere. And what he definitely wasn’t was a man not of this world. He was a gourmet, a wine connoisseur, a connoisseur of tobacco and pipes (after his death a whole collection remained), he constantly fell in love and even tried to introduce his many women to each other, sincerely hoping that they would become friends. At the end of his life, he fell in love with an eighteen-year-old girl and bitterly lamented being rejected.

He knew how to make friends - considering that friendship is a connection between loneliness. “What I am, if you are interested,” he said, “is a product of loneliness and silence.” He loved long feasts and even longer conversations. He easily learned languages: French, which he considered the language most suitable for philosophy, English, Italian, Spanish - especially so that he could read Jimenez. He considered himself a citizen of the world. He loved France almost as much as he loved Georgia, and pitied him - was it quite a joke? - which cannot be French.

Mamardashvili is a significant name. Even for those (and these are the majority) who would hardly be able to clearly explain what the subject of his academic philosophical studies was. People of the 70s and 80s “called to each other in the darkness” with his name. It became one of the names of internal freedom (which then, in the era of lack of external freedom, if anyone has forgotten, was highly valued), one of the living and most convincing proofs of its possibility.

His books, deprived of the voice behind them and the generally living presence of the author, are now very difficult to read. Thoughts abandoned halfway, indistinctness, repetitions... Also because, strictly speaking, he did not write them, although in general he wrote a lot. What is now being published (still being published, although almost 20 years have passed since his death!) are mostly transcripts and audio recordings of his lectures. Yes, he prepared carefully for each of them, and there were a lot of preparatory handwritten materials left. But his thought truly arose - and existed - only at the moment of utterance.

Mamardashvili became a real event in domestic intellectual life in the late 70s, when he began giving public lectures.

By that time, he had already established himself in academic, or even worse, official philosophy. At twenty-seven he defended his candidate's thesis, at forty - his doctorate, and at forty-two he became a professor. Moreover, he was at the very core of the Marxist ideological work of his time. He worked in the editorial office of the magazine “Problems of Peace and Socialism” in Prague, at the Institute of the International Labor Movement. Since 1968, he has been deputy editor-in-chief of Voprosy Philosophy. In 1974, however, he was fired for ideological reasons: it became finally clear that this man had nothing in common with the official framework and would never fit into it.

The real thing he did was actually best done orally.

The philosopher Mamardashvili fully became himself when he began to address not a narrow circle of specialists, not fellow philosophers, but people in general. To everyone who is ready to listen and think, regardless of their level of preparedness. Perhaps, by the way, it is also because, according to Mamardashvili, there could be no “preparedness” here in principle. No more, no matter how much he prepared, he himself had it: in his thinking, he was sure, everything happens only here and now and only through personal effort.

He confronted not only his listeners, but also himself, face to face with the event here and now of the emerging thought.

He generally believed that philosophy was real, “real,” as he said, and not the philosophy of “teachings and systems” - one. “Teachings and systems” are only in different ways, each representing it in its own way. And it is this “real” philosophy that you must - if you really want to do something real - break through through personal effort.

This effort turns out to be, according to Mamardashvili, a formative condition for culture in general, as a whole, and, moreover, for the person himself. Without it, we will only be dealing with dead forms - including the forms of ourselves. A person, in his view, is truly alive only as long as he “keeps” himself in existence by the effort of thought - an effort that is constantly renewed and never guaranteed by anything. No supports. No landmarks. Everything is happening now.

In essence, Mamardashvili’s philosophy is an anthropological (more precisely, anthropourgic) practice: a human-creating exercise in existence. Which must be constantly renewed if you want to remain human.

This is a special kind of “self-care”, self-cultivation, self-cultivation, which has been assigned to the European individual as a kind of duty since antiquity. In the version proposed by Mamardashvili, this cultivation is created by the power of thought: with it a person not only thinks of his object, but creates himself.

“We are able to understand what is written in a philosophical text,” he said in “Cartesian Meditations” in 1981, “only if we are able to reproduce in it (not the words, but what is said in it) as the possibility of our own thinking... Then there is a law that if someone has once performed an act of philosophical thinking, then it contains everything that generally happens in philosophical thinking.”

By forcing listeners to follow him in reproducing the thoughts of Kant, Descartes, Proust as a possibility for their own thinking, he gave everyone the opportunity to awaken to their own universality, “all-humanity”: to go through their own efforts and make a fact of their own life “everything that generally happens in the philosophical thinking."

A thinker like him could only arise in a post-Christian culture: developed by Christian meanings, but abandoned by them. In a cultural space that has frozen after Christian meanings have left it, but retains the form that they gave it. Feeling nostalgic for the ethical dimension of thinking, for its ethical pathos.

He said: “Philosophy knew and again renews in the twentieth century the feeling of one simple idea. It can be expressed this way: where do we care about a new person, that is, some completely different person,<…>when we are not even what we are.<…>I call a human being that being who has performed the act of individuation. No one can do it in his place or for him. This means: what we empirically see as people are not people. We are people to the extent that we have fulfilled what is potentially human in us..."

In addition to the fact that he was a professional philosopher, a cultivator of the intellectual tradition, he occupied a niche in our culture as a preacher for intellectuals. He carried out the human-forming work that religion has carried out in European societies for centuries.

He appealed directly to the human core of each of his listeners, to that which precedes all social and biographical definitions. To the immortal soul. (That’s what he said: “Forget that you are responsible for everything that happens in the world. You are responsible only to your own immortal soul.”)

With only one difference: he did not preach. I didn’t teach in the literal sense of the word. He just thought in front of his audience, never knowing in advance what he would come to. He experimented on himself with complete presence in thought.

Mamardashvili, the philosopher par excellence, became an ethical phenomenon first of all, and only then an intellectual one. Should this be considered a misunderstanding? Perhaps, still yes. It is unlikely that it was understood by its fairly wide audience in the fullness of its meaning. But he was very acutely experienced.

It is very likely that he was the only one thanks to whom our compatriots happened to experience the birth of thought as a personal event, a personal shock.

Of course, he was also perceived as a teacher of nonconformism, and this is also correct, although incomplete. His lectures were lessons in metaphysical loneliness - understanding this loneliness and accepting it as a mission.

“The whole problem of thinking consists in every act of overcoming apparent life,” he said. - Moreover, this act must be repeated again and again. Apparent life haunts us in all corners of our soul and world, and we must expel it from all corners and do this constantly. I told you that the agony of Christ will last until the end of the world, and during this time you cannot sleep.”

This is, perhaps, the main thing - regardless of whether we are Christians or not: overcoming apparent life. Lonely, responsible, at your own risk.

One incident testifies to how complete, almost fatal, inclusion in thought was for him. At the beginning of 1981, Yuri Senokosov recalled, Merab gave lectures on Descartes. Lectures began at ten in the morning. Merab was extremely punctual and was never late for anything. “And then one day everyone gathered, a huge audience, waiting, but Merab was not there. Forty minutes late. He apologized and started the lecture.” And then he told his close friends that Descartes came to him in a dream at night. They were talking. He woke up with blood gushing out of his throat.

Did Mamardashvili influence Russian philosophical thought as such? The question is complex. There are professional philosophers who closely communicated with him, experienced his strong influence and even consider themselves his students - for example, the now living Valery Podoroga. But each of them, in particular Podoroga, does his own thing, which is quite far from what Mamardashvili did. In the strict sense, he had no students, that is, direct successors to the intellectual work he began. He didn't create a school.

And this is no coincidence: he was not at all inclined to apprenticeship.

By the way, he himself did not have a Teacher - the only one with a capital and irreplaceable T. How this man became himself might seem like a big mystery if one does not remember that, according to the deepest conviction of Mamardashvili himself, a person truly creates himself only. So he created it, starting from the material that happened historically.

“The beginning,” he used to say, meaning all sorts of decidedly personal circumstances, “is always historical, that is, by chance.” In the pitch black year of 1949, the son of a career military man, commissar of a rifle division, born in Gori - in the same city as Stalin (“... Obviously,” Senokosov commented, “to atone for his atrocities”), confident from childhood that he would be a philosopher, came to Moscow to enroll to university. You can imagine how what was happening there at that time had to do with philosophy.

She had no real opportunity to study even from books. Descartes himself, together with the idealist Plato, were still on the list of prohibited authors by Lenin’s decree. You don’t even have to mention Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Husserl, Wittgenstein. All that remained was to work with what we had - the intellectual biography of Mamardashvili and his friends, young freethinkers (and at the same time Georgy Shchedrovitsky, Yuri Levada, Yuri Karyakin, Boris Grushin, Alexander Pyatigorsky, Alexander Zinoviev, Evald Ilyenkov studied with him at the Faculty of Philosophy ), began with Marx. No, the son of a commissar, who throughout his student years never parted with the first volume of Capital, was by no means preparing to become a party ideologist. He was not interested in the political side of the matter, but in the purely mental one. Marx gave him the idea of ​​becoming - together with Grushin, Zinoviev and Shchedrovitsky - one of the founders of the Moscow Logical Circle.

“For us, the logical side of Capital,” he said much later, “if you pay attention to it, and we did, it was just material of thought that we did not need.”<…>to invent, it was given as a model of intellectual work.”

Where the bulk of his contemporaries saw nothing but unshakable ideological authority, Mamardashvili saw a problem. He, as he talked about this decades later, then saw “a theoretical task before him: to understand what a text is? What is consciousness? “The very posing of these questions,” he explained, “at that time answered my anarchist aspirations, the desire to gain freedom in life as such. I longed for inner freedom, and philosophy turned out to be the tool that allowed me to achieve it... [And in this] Marx helped me. Indeed, in his youth he began precisely with the criticism of consciousness - at the level of criticism of ideology.”

Among other things, this story is again about the fact that it’s not about the texts or the material. And not in teachers. And not even in the environment. Because Mamardashvili also significantly diverged from many of his fellow students at the Faculty of Philosophy later.

He, who spent half his life lecturing and became famous precisely because of this, was sure that it was, in principle, impossible to teach - that is, to convey a certain ready-made amount of knowledge and skills - in philosophy. You can only show an example, which, in turn, can be perceived or not perceived, followed or not followed. And which, most importantly, each perceiver will inevitably integrate into solving their own problems. Maybe even far from philosophy as such. And so it happened.

In the end, Socrates, with whom Mamardashvili was compared during his lifetime, did not create any school either. But, as Whitehead noted, the whole of European philosophy became a footnote to the notes (probably free!) of his student Plato.

Wittgenstein effect

At least three major intellectual movements owe their existence to Ludwig Wittgenstein, without which the past century would be unthinkable. The early Wittgenstein is considered its predecessor by logical positivism, the later by Oxford linguistic philosophy and the American philosophy of linguistic analysis.

Deficiency symptom

In late Soviet society, there were two alternative mechanisms for recognizing humanists, each of which worked perfectly. The first is official recognition, expressed in various kinds of bonuses that loyal thinkers received during their careers, ending, say, with the title of academician. The second mechanism was alternative - these were various kinds of critical thinkers who did not receive any special bonuses from the Soviet government, but enjoyed extraordinary popularity among the Soviet intelligentsia (the phenomenon of M. Mamardashvili). published

Merab Mamardashvili is a very special person not only for Georgia, but also for the entire intellectual society of the 20th century. He was often called the “Georgian Socrates”. However, his most “Socratic” feature was that he wrote down virtually nothing. Mamardashvili spoke a lot, calling his lectures “conversations.” He did not want to gain immortality, but he succeeded - and in a very unusual way, through the memories of other people.

Early years

Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili was born in 1930 in Georgia, into a military family. His childhood was spent in the Vinnitsa region of Ukraine - his father served there. However, after the outbreak of hostilities, the Mamardashvili family was evacuated to Georgia. Merab graduated from school with honors. After that, he moves to Moscow and enters Moscow State University. Lomonosov, who graduates in 1954.

Three years later, Merab graduated from graduate school and began working at the journal Questions of Philosophy. The first of his articles is published in the same publication. In 1961 Mamardashvili was sent to Prague. Here he began working in a magazine called “Problems of Peace and Socialism.” There Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili gets the opportunity to communicate with many outstanding philosophers of that time. His social circle included Jean-Paul Sartre, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Milos Forman and others.

Unrecognized and travel restricted philosopher

From 1966 to 1968 he worked as a department head at the Institute of the International Labor Movement (now the Institute of Comparative Political Science of the Russian Academy of Sciences). In 1967, authorities unauthorizedly extended his trip to Paris, and Mamardashvili was banned from traveling abroad for two decades. From 1968 to 1974 he again worked in the journal “Problems of Philosophy” - now as deputy editor-in-chief. In 1970, he began teaching the course “Phenomenology of Hegel’s Spirit” for students of the Faculty of Philosophy of Moscow State University. In 1972 he was awarded the title of professor. From 1978 to 1980 he lectured on philosophy at VGIK. In 1980, Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili came to Georgia again. He does not receive any honorary titles in what was then Georgia, which was part of the Soviet Union.

In 1988, after a long break, he again met with his longtime friend Pierre Belfroy. In 1989, Mamardashvili received an invitation from the Kettering Foundation and went to the USA to give lectures at Ohio University. November 25, 1990 dies due to heart failure at Vnukovo airport. The philosopher was buried in Tbilisi.

True thinker

Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili was a philosopher in everything, even in everyday life. This showed up even in everyday situations. For example, once a friend told him that he would like to go to Vladivostok, but as far away as possible. Merab Konstantinovich raised his eyebrow in surprise and asked: “Where is it far from?” His contemporaries write that he was a true philosopher in the fullness of this concept - one who seeks the true names of phenomena, tries to call things by their proper names. Perhaps he truly loved only philosophers, never hiding his spiritual connection with them. M.K. Mamardashvili’s book about Kant amazes with its brotherly love for this thinker.

Philosophy cannot be taught

All of Merab Konstantinovich’s life attitudes were connected with his understanding of the possibility of access to philosophical knowledge. And in this area the thinker saw a serious miscalculation. In the article by Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili “How I understand philosophy” it is written that this science cannot be taught to a person. After all, you can learn philosophy only by independently trying to find answers to its questions, practicing your ability to reason. That is why this area is not a body of “obtained knowledge” and in no way a “result of learning.”

Philosophy is experienced as a certain deep property of the human spirit. Based on an analysis of Kant’s works, M.K. Mamardashvili comes to the conclusion that only personal experience can generate truly important questions. And to those questions that arise from such experience, one can seek answers in philosophical knowledge. Mamardashvili believed that there is a very special path of the thinker, which comes through his own difficulties and trials. It is thanks to these adversities that the philosopher gains invaluable experience.

In his philosophy, Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili proceeds from the fact that there are two forms of thinking - formal and substantive. In this case, the form cannot be reduced to content, since it is generative for the latter. It is a construct for the meanings, experiences, and states of a person as a whole. Form is the ability to express the structure of thinking.

What is good for a person

Mamardashvili wrote that it is extremely important for a person that both happiness and unhappiness be the result of his own actions, and not fall to him as a gift from heaven for obedience. The philosopher emphasizes that it is very important to understand the patterns that operate in the world. A person must clearly understand what he is able to do for his life himself, and not receive in incomprehensible ways from the “higher game”, which gives him either gifts or evil punishments.

Merab Konstantinovich criticizes modern man for his infantility, inability to grow up and gain life experience from those situations that repeat with him again and again. People cannot change themselves and therefore fall into the same traps - “they remain children if they live outside the competently developed structure of consciousness.”

Books by Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili

One of the thinker’s most popular publications is the book “How I Understand Philosophy.” It includes selected interviews, articles and reports by Mamardashvili. The thinker touches on important questions about what is the meaning of human life, what is the role and place of philosophical knowledge in society. Mamardashvili also talks about the role of science and religion in the life of society.

Another publication is “Lectures on Ancient Philosophy.” They represent one of Mamardashvili's courses on the history of philosophy. The thinker set himself the task of telling about the history of the development of “love of wisdom” as a person’s attempt to find his place in the world. Mamardashvili's focus is on the question of existence.

Also popular among modern readers is the work of Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili “Symbol and Consciousness.” The book was first published in 1982. Its main theme is the consideration of the life of consciousness through the prism of symbols, which are a very special way of expressing this life.

“Essay on Modern European Philosophy” by Merab Konstantinovich Mamardashvili is a collection of lectures that the thinker read at VGIK in the period from 1978 to 1979. In a clear and interesting manner, the philosopher talks about the philosophy of Sartre, Husserl, and Heidegger. He also pays attention to the works of Freud. The book is intended for a wide range of readers.

Philosophical views of Mamardashvili: the purpose of man

Mamardashvili differs from other thinkers in his original views on the problems of consciousness and being. The basis of his ideas was the study of European culture. For Mamardashvili, every idea is already an opportunity for a new birth, a new being. What is the reason for the loss of human existence? Mamardashvili believes that the reason for everything is “the mental illiteracy of the country.”

Unreasonable thinking: the tragedy of modern man

Moreover, it does not consist in the skills to solve mathematical problems, but represents the ability to reason, based on spiritual ideals, and focus on culture. The philosopher calls unreasonable thinking attempts to rationalize spiritual phenomena, completely excluding the emotional component from them. Mamardashvili calls this approach “hell”, since this is the loss of true freedom, the opportunity to create. The cause of tragedy is that man forgets knowledge.

The thinker defined philosophy as a special way of thinking that considers a person from the point of view of his ultimate purpose, the meaning of his life. Mamardashvili pointed out that people were not created once and for all by God or evolution. On the contrary, the development of a person occurs continuously, through his own participation and the application of his efforts. This constant creation of oneself is what can be called “the image and likeness of God,” the philosopher emphasizes.

Ideas about being

Being, the philosopher emphasizes, is always one and complete - it cannot be expressed to one degree or another. This is precisely the nature of love, dignity, and faith. And being is a state of personality; it must be created from scratch every time. And memory contributes greatly to creativity. It is with its help that a person is able to put together the scattered “fragments of being” that were once lost. The revelation of existence is the truth that animates thoughts.